Written and edited by Norm Scott:
EDUCATE! ORGANIZE!! MOBILIZE!!!
Three pillars of The Resistance – providing information on current ed issues, organizing activities around fighting for public education in NYC and beyond and exposing the motives behind the education deformers. We link up with bands of resisters. Nothing will change unless WE ALL GET INVOLVED IN THE STRUGGLE!

Monday, December 12, 2016

An underappreciated fact about the 2016 election: The massive generation gap

Obama carried the under-30 vote by 34 percentage points in
2008 and by 23 points in 2012, according to the national exit polls. Hillary Clinton may have lacked
Obama’s (and Bernie Sanders’s) personal appeal among younger voters, but
she still carried the under-30 vote by an 18-point margin over Trump,
according to the 2016 exit polls.....Now that it is the Democratic Party that is becoming more Sun Belt
than Rust Belt, that is the favored party of revitalized urban
metropolises and centers of innovation such as the high-tech sector, and
that is more attuned to the millennial-generation cultural zeitgeist,
older conservatives exhibit a shaken faith in the wisdom of popular
majorities....

Here's a piece offering some hopes to the Democrats sent to my by my pal Harris. I'm not so sure about this analysis. The focus on the youth vote has a few holes.
2008- Obama wins by 34%
2012- Obama wins by 23%
2016 - Hillary wins by 18%

What will 2020 show? and what about the yutes that age out? As people age a chunk often shifts right.

And this piece doesn't answer why Bernie got the support of more young people than Hillary did - and don't forget the numbers of young who did not even vote. Enthusiasm counts and so does the message. Think of it - Bernie is older than Hillary and male. Duh! One would think that given the choice.... so why not analyze why.

Now I believe people who voted for Trump or 3rd party to spite the Democrats or over Hillary hatred will come to regret it. Dems may suck too but if you don't think that there is a difference between ruth Bader Ginsberg and the slugs to come or the slugs like Clarence Thomas or the late Scalia -- or that the cabinet people this time are the same as under Obama you are living in a dream - soon to turn into a nightmare --

Since the election last month, we have seen a parade of analyses
examining how Clinton supporters differ from Trump supporters by race,
education and geographic residence. The persistence of partisan
differences by age in American elections, however, has received somewhat
less attention.

Younger voters, who first demonstrated a notable
relative preference for the Democratic Party in the 2004 presidential
election, swung even further toward the Democrats in the two Obama
elections. Obama carried the under-30 vote by 34 percentage points in
2008 and by 23 points in 2012, according to the national exit polls. At
the same time, voters over the age of 50 collectively preferred
Republican nominees John McCain and Mitt Romney to Obama in both of his
successful national campaigns.Hillary Clinton may have lacked
Obama’s (and Bernie Sanders’s) personal appeal among younger voters, but
she still carried the under-30 vote by an 18-point margin over Trump,
according to the 2016 exit polls, while voters over the age of 45 opted
for Trump by nine points — confirming that the contemporary political
generation gap will outlast the Obama era.

This is a significant
divide by historical standards. None of the 1960s-era elections produced
a comparable partisan difference, despite the decade’s prominent
youth-led protest movements and memorable “don’t trust anyone over 30″
rhetoric. According to Gallup data, Hubert Humphrey led Richard Nixon in
1968 among voters under 30 by only nine points, 47 percent to 38
percent, while voters over the age of 50 preferred Nixon by just six
points (47 percent to 41 percent). So Trump performed about as well
among young voters in a two-person contest as Nixon did in a three-way
race.

Many of the most prominent political issues of our time
include a generational dimension separating the left-leaning young from
their more conservative elders. Social issues such as gay rights and
drug legalization divide Americans sharply by age. The Affordable Care
Act drew its fiercest opposition from the elderly — who already enjoyed
Medicare benefits and thus perceived little collective benefit in
expanding health-care access to younger citizens. Climate change is of
greater concern to those who stand to inherit the planet than to those
who rule it today. Democratic candidates frequently tout their plans for
enhancing college affordability and access to child care; Republicans
seldom discuss these topics. Conservative efforts to lower federal tax
rates on high incomes also stand to primarily benefit older — and
disproportionately wealthier — voters.

More broadly, the 2016 election exposed a key divide in the American
electorate between nationalism and internationalism, between a
preference for traditional social hierarchies and an attraction to new
social norms. The themes of cultural nostalgia and alienation adopted by
the Trump campaign were particularly primed to appeal to older
generations feeling increasingly out of place in contemporary society
and preferring a bygone past of perceived American “greatness” defined
by a rejection of “political correctness” at home and an adherence to
military and economic unilateralism abroad.

Just as the Brexit
referendum in Britain passed over the opposition of a younger generation
of Britons much more at ease with European integration than their
parents and grandparents, the oldest incoming president in American
history assembled a narrow electoral coalition that is heavily weighted
toward his own age cohort. There’s no particular reason to believe that
he will govern in a manner that increases his appeal to those who did
not support his candidacy. A Pew survey released this week found
Trump with a favorable rating of just 24 percent among respondents aged
18-29 and 25 percent among those aged 30-49, compared with 47 percent
among 50-to-64-year-olds and 54 percent among the 65-and-over
population.

Ronald Reagan’s famous “optimism” was to some degree
an assured belief that the future belonged to conservatives. A more
extensive elucidation of this view, complete with accompanying data, can
be found in any number of the essays written by Michael Barone in the
1980s for the Almanac of American Politics. Barone viewed
Reagan’s electoral success as proof that a majority of American voters
had come to recognize the fundamental flaws of liberalism and were
acting together to push their country in a rightward direction. The
Democrats, according to Barone, were the party of declining central
cities, out-of-fashion hippie relics, and Rust Belt anachronism; the
Republicans were the party of burgeoning suburbs, private-sector
innovators, and Sun Belt futurism.

Importantly, in Barone’s view,
conservatives were winning the hearts and minds of younger Americans,
who could be expected to take up Reagan’s torch and advance it still
further through subsequent decades. As Barone and Grant Ujifusa wrote in
the 1990 edition of the Almanac, “[t]he young voters of the
1980s, Republican strategists hope, and Democratic strategists fear,
will carry their sunny Republicanism into the 2030s and 2040s.”Young
people may still be sunny these days, but Republicanism is decidedly
not. The victories of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama damaged
conservatives’ confidence that they spoke for an enduring popular
majority, and the main conservative objectives of shrinking the size and
scope of government, establishing American military supremacy abroad,
and promoting morally traditionalist attitudes among the American public
have all, to varying degrees and for varying reasons, remained
unfulfilled in the years since Reagan departed the national stage.

When combined with the continuing leftward evolution of American culture
in the realms of race, gender, religion and sexuality, these
developments have left many conservatives — including the current
president-elect — warning darkly of the imminent destruction of the
United States as we know it, which in turn justifies increasingly
aggressive challenges from the right to established political norms and
institutions.

Now that it is the Democratic Party that is becoming more Sun Belt
than Rust Belt, that is the favored party of revitalized urban
metropolises and centers of innovation such as the high-tech sector, and
that is more attuned to the millennial-generation cultural zeitgeist,
older conservatives exhibit a shaken faith in the wisdom of popular
majorities. Barone himself has taken to explicitly arguing in favor of
the electoral college precisely because it might act — as it did in 2016 — to thwart the will of a national plurality
that he finds ideologically and demographically uncongenial. Other
Republicans have responded to social change by advocating restrictions
on access to the ballot that disproportionately affect young and
nonwhite citizens, to further tilt the electoral system away from their
political opponents.

As the Republican victories of 2014 and 2016
confirm, there is no youth-led “permanent Democratic majority,” in part
because our electoral rules and institutions tend to provide
Republicans with a built-in advantage in close elections. Plus, there
are simply lots and lots of baby boomers and pre-boomers, and they vote
more reliably than their children and grandchildren.

But if the
young will respond to Trump’s ascendance by resenting the
disproportionate political and economic power of the right-leaning old,
the old will continue to resent the increasing cultural power of the
left-leaning young. The power of the presidency simply does not extend to authority over the national culture,
and the institutions that do exert substantial cultural influence — the
news media, entertainment industry, educational system, and so forth —
can be expected to serve as centers of resistance to Trump and Trumpism.

Cultural
backlash can be a powerful tool for winning elections, but it’s very
hard to actually deliver on promises to move an entire society back in
time.

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